HE WILL KILL YOU an absolutely gripping crime thriller with a massive twist

by Charlie Gallagher

  ‘Hey!’ she called out. She almost expected his eyes to snatch open, to flash with his usual mischief. There was no reaction. She finally moved forward. She walked around to the other side of the bed, reached out and took hold of his right hand. She was relieved when it felt warm. She felt for his pulse. It was slow and weak but it was there. She felt like she needed a sure sign of life. She gripped his fingers in hers, leant over to gather up his left hand, too. She massaged his ring finger. She managed a smile.

  ‘What were you thinking, eh? Marriage! How the hell was that going to work? Sums you up, that does. Big gestures and never thinking past today.’ She lifted his right hand, brushed her hair away from her face and rested his fingers on her cheek. Just like he used to do. His touch had always been so electric — it never mattered when, it never mattered why. No one had made her feel like that before. She wondered if anyone ever would again. ‘I’m gonna miss that . . .’

  She put his hand back down. She had already been here too long. This had been a stupid idea. But she had to see him.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you, Adam. You get better — you hear me?’ she said. Maddie pushed her sunglasses back on. ‘And my answer? You’ll have to ask me properly to find that out! One thing I do know is that we’re no good for each other, we never have been. But who wants to be good? Maybe it could work — somehow!’ She fought her emotions and struggled to speak. ‘I do love you.’

  She leaned in and pressed her lips to his cheek, lingering with her eyes tightly shut. When she stood back up she moved away quickly. She picked up her heels rather than sliding them back on. She pulled the blind up roughly and pushed up close to the window. She couldn’t see the officer. Quietly and carefully, she opened the door. She could hear the officer’s voice — a murmur and then a stifled female giggle — it was to her right, back the way she had come. She pulled the door open further and moved into the corridor. She cast a quick glance to the right: the officer had his back to her and was talking to a slim nurse. Maddie turned quickly left. She didn’t look back, her footsteps almost silent on the floor. She made it to a set of double doors and slipped through them.

  ‘Hey! Miss!’ The shout came from behind her; it was the officer. The closing door cut him off. Maddie couldn’t answer, even if she had wanted to. The tears had come, her eyes were blurred and she broke into a run. She could just make out the lurid green of the fire exit signs hanging from the ceiling and she followed their direction through another set of doors. She came out into a busier corridor and ducked her head down as she ran, keeping to the green signs. Though the corridors seemed to go on forever, somehow she found her way out onto the streets of London, where the roads and pavements bustled with noise and movement.

  Her senses were blurred, her head full of noise and confusion. She was still running when she felt an impact. Someone bundled over in front of her, and the shoes she had been clutching spilled onto the pavement. She held her hands towards the blur of colour now laid out on the pavement as a sort of apology. Someone was yelling at her and she broke back into a run. Her head still swirled, the world around her still distorted by her thick tears, her bare feet pounding on the damp concrete.

  * * *

  Maddie was still out of breath when she stumbled onto the train at Victoria Station. She felt hot too, despite the freezing weather, but overriding it all, she felt exhausted — entirely spent. She flopped into a seat. She felt like she had nothing more to give, as if just standing back up would be too much effort. She let her head lean against the window and dumped her bag on the table in front of her. The train was quiet. It was at the start of its route and it wouldn’t be setting off for a few minutes yet. She stared out of the window. Foot traffic was still busy but she was only seeing blocks of colour rather than people. Her mouth hung open. She felt like she might cry again. She had lost her sunglasses at the same time she had lost her shoes. There would be nothing to conceal her tears, but she didn’t care anymore. They didn’t come anyway. She just felt empty.

  ‘That was risky.’

  Maddie flinched at the rumbling growl. A man had taken the seat next to her. She hadn’t even noticed.

  ‘Harry!’ She wiped her face instinctively and sat up straight, now desperate to think of her story, her reason for being there. Years of conditioning. Normally she would have one ready to go.

  ‘What do you think happens now?’ Harry continued while she still floundered.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If those officers start making calls, asking questions. You might have got away with it today, but tomorrow, when his real sister turns up?’

  Maddie fixed on him. She knew better than to try a pretence, even a well-practiced story wouldn’t get her anywhere. Not with Harry. She relaxed. Conceded. Her body slumped, her apathy returned.

  ‘You tell me? They might ask questions, sure. More likely those two officers will figure they’ve been duped and play the whole thing down. No harm done — assuming it’s the same two on shift tomorrow.’

  ‘Or they review the CCTV and send the stills up the line to your old force, just to see if anyone knows the mystery woman.’

  ‘They might. Nothing I can do about that now. I was aware of the cameras on the way in . . .’ Maddie pushed herself back into the headrest and peered forward. She heard a distant whistle then a fast beeping noise. The doors on the other side of the carriage slid shut and the train shuddered as if a forward gear had been engaged. She considered that she had kept her head down on the way into the hospital and, combined with the sunglasses it should be an effective disguise. She hadn’t been so careful on the way out however. ‘Nothing I can do about any of it.’

  ‘The damage is done,’ Harry said.

  ‘It certainly is now. Do what you need to do, Harry. Tell whoever you need to tell. And you know what? I don’t care. Maybe you’ll be doing me a favour. I assume DCI Lowe knows you’re here?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t. You think telling him really does you a favour?’

  Maddie didn’t reply. She didn’t know anything right now.

  ‘I’m not here to get you in trouble.’

  ‘Then what are you here for?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Talk to me?’ She let her head roll so she could look at him. He was facing forward. He looked pensive, not what she might expect from someone who had such an upper hand. ‘You’ve got my number haven’t you? You could have just called. Told me what you knew. You didn’t have to make a grand gesture.’

  ‘Grand gesture?’

  ‘Coming here. Following me. Sitting next to me with my make-up running on the worst day of my life. Calling me into your office would have done the job. You didn’t need to humiliate me in the process.’

  ‘This wasn’t what I had planned for a grand gesture.’

  ‘You did have one planned then?’

  She sensed movement. A cardboard box thumped onto the table in front of her. A shoebox. Harry knocked the lid off. He lifted out a pair of slip-on shoes. They were plain black and cheap looking.

  ‘This was my grand gesture.’ He swept the box away and put the shoes down. ‘What are you? I reckoned on a size 5.’

  Maddie snorted a laugh. It came from somewhere. It broke though the emptiness and the fatigue. She picked them up and pulled her legs up to try them on. They felt tight, but they fitted.

  ‘Perfect fit,’ she said.

  ‘That’s as grand as I get. And they were all I could get. I spent most of the time trying to keep up. Those were all they had here at the station. It was the only time you were still enough that I wouldn’t lose you.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘That you wouldn’t go anywhere? I can read a train timetable.’

  ‘That I was coming up here in the first place. And why.’

  ‘I took a call from your superintendent up in Manchester after he spoke to you. He said he was worried about you. He said when he had spoken to you about the inspector’s job you had sur
prised him a bit. He said you sounded fragile. I think he was worried he had put you under pressure from nowhere. He wanted me to keep an eye on you. I think he’s worried you won’t go back.’

  ‘Pressure!’ Maddie scoffed.

  ‘You’re a strong woman, Maddie. We all know it. If your mask slips, even for a moment, no one knows what to do. I asked him what you had talked about. He told me a bit about your history with this Yarwood guy — the brother at least. I couldn’t see any reason why that call would have upset you. But it did. He doesn’t have a clue, Maddie — your boss I mean — even when he was talking about this lad having a girlfriend down here. He was harsh when he talked about this Yarwood bloke. Derogatory. He certainly doesn’t see him as a great loss. I reckon he spoke to you in the same way. I assumed that was why he got the reaction he did.’

  ‘I understand his attitude. It’s cops and robbers, right? All a game.’

  ‘Except when it isn’t.’

  ‘Except when it isn’t.’ Maddie’s attention was back outside. The world was now passing her window in a blur as they picked up speed.

  ‘We got talking about the Yarwoods. Seems this Adam had some strange travel patterns when he was coming down south. He was losing his surveillance teams, not an easy thing to do unless he was taking advice from someone who might know how to do that. I had a hunch and I compared his travel against your rest days.’ Maddie’s attention stayed out the window. She didn’t reply, Harry continued. ‘The superintendent told me this Adam‘s in a bad way. We talked about his family coming down Monday, he wanted to see if I had any sway in getting some foot surveillance resources that might assist. He didn’t realise that I don’t cover the Met. Anyway, the family visit tomorrow gave you a very small window if you wanted to see him. It had to be today or nothing. That’s the sort of thing you might consider worthy of upsetting the ACC for. It was the only theory that made sense.’

  ‘Well done, Detective. So what? You came all the way up here to prove you were right? To prove to yourself that you’ve still got it?’ Maddie felt a flash of anger as she turned back to him.

  ‘Grace is getting off, Maddie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Grace Hughes. She was arrested and taken to hospital, but she’ll be de-arrested and treated as a witness. Once she’s out of surgery, that is. She’ll walk free.’

  ‘Walk free? What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s no actual evidence linking her to any of it. She’ll give evidence to support Viktor’s prosecution, but that will be all that is asked of her.’

  ‘What do you mean no evidence? She made the call that killed Craig Dolton. And she knew it would. She had the phone on her that she used when she was arrested. And she told me there would be information on that phone linking her to everything else.’

  ‘The phone was supplied by Viktor. We’re working on proving that, but the important thing is, we can’t disprove it. We’ll be able to show that the call that killed Craig Dolton was made from that phone, but that doesn’t mean Grace made it. Everything else we can now point towards Viktor, it won’t be difficult to convince a jury that he made that call too. But he had done a good job of stitching her up. The only reason we knew to even look at him was because she scrawled his name up on that window and then you made sure she would be here to give her evidence.’

  ‘She told me, though. We both heard it. She said she killed Craig. She made that call and she knew it would kill him.’

  ‘On the way to hospital, I called Karen Wilson—’

  ‘The defence solicitor? Why would you do that?’

  ‘I told her I had someone under investigation for murder and I asked if she would come in and represent her when she made it to custody.’

  ‘Karen Wilson, the queen of the no comment interview?’

  Harry’s face flickered a grin. ‘I’ve since heard she has that reputation.’

  Maddie was catching up. She could suddenly see where this was going. ‘Grace was a mess. She was ready to blurt everything in interview, including how she made that call.’

  ‘I sat next to her when they took her to hospital. I only left her to come back to speak with you. But I made it clear that she shouldn’t be discussing the case. I spoke to Karen again too. I told her what we had. I also told her what we didn’t have.’

  ‘You mean any actual evidence?’

  ‘Not with regard to her client. Not unless she wanted to make a full and frank confession in the interview that will follow.’

  ‘She won’t be doing that then?’ Maddie was conscious that she was smirking.

  Harry shrugged. ‘Who knows what she’ll do. But she thanked me.’

  ‘I bet she did!’

  ‘I’ve never had a defence solicitor thank me before. It was a little disconcerting.’

  Despite everything, Maddie snorted a chuckle — but soon sobered up a little. ‘This is serious stuff! She’s a murder suspect, Harry. I had you pegged as Mr By-the-Book — black and white. She killed Craig and you know it. And why tell me? If you’d manipulated a situation to get someone off a murder case then you’d keep it to yourself, surely?’

  ‘I’m telling you, so you know. So you know my truth. And I came here today so you would understand that I know yours. We already had trust, but that’s not enough on its own. Not if we’re going to be working together. We need more than that. Now we have it. Now we have this. What Grace said in the heat of the moment with guns pointed at her after seeing what she had seen . . . it could well have been argued that it wasn’t admissible anyway. It would take a harsh judge and jury to convict her, but the whole experience of it . . . she would definitely have spent time in prison on remand. A good few months. Then have her life pulled apart in court. You can be sure her diary would be used as part of her cross-examination, including the images of that contraption. She’s had enough.’

  Maddie turned back to the window. They had moved out of the city and the world was now blocks of green and brown.

  ‘That is something I cannot disagree with. And that’s why you told me not to write a statement until we had talked about it? You didn’t want me to put into the evidence that she told me she’d killed Craig Dolton.’

  ‘I wanted you to know that you didn’t have to.’

  ‘It would be a lot tougher to do that now. It would put you in a difficult situation too.’

  ‘I still need to put a statement in. You can write what you want. I just wanted you to know that there might be a way out. For Grace. And for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘I read that diary, same as you. But I know you cared about her. I know you told her you would protect her. I know what it feels like when you let someone down. You didn’t, Maddie, and you still get to keep her safe. She doesn’t deserve prison. Not for doing what she did.’ Harry’s voice was becoming heavier with emotion, as much as she had ever heard from him. ‘Grace will have had good legal advice by now — about what to say and what not to admit to. Right now she’s a witness. I assumed you would want to keep her on that side of the courtroom.’

  ‘Well, of course I do! That’s what I don’t understand. You could have just explained that you didn’t pick up any verbals from Grace because of all the confusion and suggest that maybe I didn’t either. I would have understood and it would have been unsaid — an understanding. That’s how this works — I know that. You didn’t have to come up here and show your position of power. I’m a little offended that you felt the need to strong-arm me. I guess I thought we trusted each other by now.’

  ‘We do have trust already, but we need more if you and I are to work together. This is more.’

  ‘We’re working together now, are we?’

  Harry hesitated. He pulled at his jacket to straighten it. ‘I have a vacancy coming up in Major Crime. One of my sergeants wants to move on, for development reasons.’

  ‘Really? Who’s that?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure yet, whoever I choose to move out of your way.’ Harry’s lips curled i
nto a more prominent grin this time.

  Maddie couldn’t help but mirror it. ‘Thank you, Harry.’

  ‘Don’t thank me yet. You still have that job offer on the table back in Manchester — the next rank. You must be tempted?’

  ‘I am.’ Maddie fell silent. She let her head roll against the headrest with the movement of the train. ‘Right now I can’t be making decisions. I can’t even think straight.’

  A silence fell over them. Maddie’s mind moved away from Grace. She was safe and she was free. Inevitably it moved onto Adam. She gazed out of her window where she now had an elevated view of a river with cattle grazing lazily either side.

  ‘I love him, you know. But, however this plays out, today was the last time I’ll ever see him.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He might die, Harry. The nurse said as much. She played it down with her words but I could tell what she was really thinking. But even if he doesn’t, it will be a long recovery. I’ve seen people with head injuries. He will be laid up, his family buzzing around him back up in Manchester. There’s no way I could get anywhere near him. It would be too dangerous for us both. I always knew it was going to end. I didn’t think it would be like this. In a perverse way, this might all be for the best.’

  ‘You don’t know this is the end.’

  ‘I do.’ Suddenly Maddie couldn’t speak, her lips quivered. She stifled her emotion, took a deep breath and swallowed. ‘And you’re the last person I wanted to see me like this. Stupid and weak.’

  ‘No one ever fell in love and got weaker, Maddie. You didn’t, I didn’t. No one does. And when you lose someone, you get stronger still. Because you have to.’

  The emotion in his voice was back and it was genuine, and suddenly she didn’t feel so empty, so alone in her grief. She wasn’t concerned that she didn’t have her sunglasses to hide behind either. Maybe she didn’t need to be hiding her emotions anymore. Not around Harry. Now they had more than trust.

  She leaned a little to her right until her head found his shoulder. The train rocked gently. She closed her eyes. Her nostrils filled with the smell of his wax jacket. Adam had once worn one with a very similar scent. She listened to the train clack and bump as it whisked her away from London and towards her home. For a moment she could almost fool herself that she was sitting next to Adam Yarwood, that Grace Hughes’s troubles might be over for good, that her own world hadn’t been turned completely upside down and that she knew exactly what she should do next.